Frequently asked questions

1. Install Fenzly from the App Store or Google Play.
2. Sign in with your phone number or your email: you receive a one-time code, there is no password to remember.
3. Pick a display name, the one your circle will see.
4. Grant the permissions the app asks for: location “Always”, notifications, and on Android the battery-optimisation exemption. Without them Fenzly cannot detect your arrivals while it runs in the background.
5. Create a circle, or join someone’s circle with the code they sent you.

The guide First launch and permissions walks through every screen.

Your account is identified by a verified channel: a phone number or an email address. Every time you sign in, Fenzly sends you a one-time code by SMS or by email, valid for a few minutes.

So there is no password to invent, forget or leak. If the SMS does not arrive, ask for the code by email, or the other way round: both channels open the same account once you have verified them in the settings.

Not at the same time. A Fenzly account is active on one device at a time: if you sign in on a second phone or a tablet, the first one is signed out. It says so on screen, and you receive an email about it, in case it was not you.

The reason is end-to-end encryption: your keys, places, circles and messages live only on your phone, and the server cannot copy them to another device because it cannot read them. Using several devices in parallel is being looked at, but is not available yet.

To move from one phone to another without losing anything, follow the guide Switching phones: the new phone gets a fresh backup from the old one before taking over.

Yes, for most of what it does. Your data lives on your phone, so the app stays usable with no signal. Whatever involves other people waits for the connection to return.

What keeps working

• Detecting your arrivals at and departures from your places.
• Recording your trips, with speed, distance and elevation.
• Reading your timeline, your history, your places and your past conversations.

What waits for the network

• Sharing with your circles: your arrivals, departures and trips are sent as soon as the connection is back.
• Text messages: they stay marked as pending, then leave by themselves. A photo cannot be sent offline.
• An SOS alert: the app says plainly that it could not leave, puts calling first, and can keep the alert queued; your position follows it once the network is back. See How does the SOS button work?.

What does not work

• Seeing where your people are right now: the map shows their last known positions, and a banner says so.
• Address search and the name suggestions when you name a place. You can still position the pin by hand and type the name.
• Signing in to your account on a phone, backing up and restoring.

Maps without a network

The map background is not stored in the app: it is loaded as you move around the map, then kept on your phone.

• Areas you have already displayed stay available, at the zoom levels you used.
• Anywhere else, the background is grey. Positions, places and your route are still drawn on top of it.
• The space used is limited: when it is full, the maps you looked at longest ago are removed first.

Preparing an area in advance. You can load the maps of a place before you go there: while you still have a connection, open the map over that area, move around it and go through the zoom levels you will need. Do it just before a hike, for example, if you know coverage will be poor. Those maps then stay available offline.

On the other side, a member whose phone has had no connection for several hours is flagged on the map of their circles.

Fenzly uses Double Ratchet end-to-end encryption, the same protocol family as Signal and WhatsApp, to protect your locations. It runs on Olm, an open-source implementation whose core library was independently audited. Every location update is encrypted on your device, individually for each recipient, before it is ever sent.

The server only ever carries opaque encrypted data: it knows neither your coordinates, nor the names of your places, nor who is in your circles. Even we, who operate the service, cannot read your location.

No. Fenzly is built on a blind server model:

• the positions you share and the names of your places are encrypted and never readable server-side;
• your presence at a place is computed on your phone, never transmitted;
• your address book and the composition of your circles stay on your device only.

The server is an encrypted relay and a switchboard: it knows whom to forward a message to, never what it contains. What it holds comes down to your account, your devices and your subscription receipts, and you can check that yourself with the “Server data” export in the app, Settings → Personal data → Download my data. Your data is hosted in Switzerland, in line with the GDPR and the Swiss nDPA.

Two details, both about maps:

• Address search. When you search for an address or name a place, the lookup passes through the server, which relays it to the map provider so that the provider does not see your IP address. The server therefore sees that address or that spot at that moment, without tying it to your account.
• Map backgrounds. They are loaded by your phone straight from MapTiler, our map provider. MapTiler sees your IP address and the areas displayed, not your account or the positions drawn on the map. Backgrounds already loaded stay cached on your phone.

Only the members of the circles you chose to share with, and only what you chose to share. Each circle has its own setting: arrivals and departures at the circle’s places, your latest position, or nothing at all. You can change it at any time from the circle.

Live sharing, started from the map or a conversation, is time-limited and stops by itself when the chosen duration ends.

One exception: when you send an SOS, the members who received the alert follow your position live, whatever your settings, until 30 minutes after someone takes charge (4 hours at most), or until you cancel the alert. See How does the SOS button work?.

Fenzly itself never sees your position: it is encrypted on your phone, for each recipient, before it is sent.

Your contacts stay on your phone. To find someone who already uses Fenzly, the app compares fingerprints (a hash of the email or number), never the data itself, and only if you turned that search on.

Discovery by email is on by default, discovery by phone number is off by default. You can change both in Settings, under Discoverability, and nothing is sent unless you use the search.

A place is a spot you name: home, school, the office. It is stored on your phone, with its coordinates and radius.

A circle is a group of people: your family, a duo, a team. The circle is where you choose which places you share and what its members learn about you.

When a member arrives at a shared place of the circle, the other members are told, if that member chose to share those events. A place can be shared in several circles, or in none.

From the circle, generate an invitation code. It looks like FZ-7K4M-92 and comes with a fenzly.app/c/… link you can send in a message.

The invited person types the code into Fenzly, or opens the link. You then receive a request to confirm: nobody enters your circle without your consent. They then choose for themselves what they share.

A code is valid for seven days and about ten uses, then it expires. The server only knows the code and its owner, never the circle it opens.

In a family circle, a guardian can designate a member as a child. Their account stays a normal Fenzly account, with its own keys and its own data, but the app applies guardrails:

• the child communicates and shares only with the members of their family circles, plus the contacts a guardian explicitly allowed;
• they cannot create a circle, invite anyone, add a contact, or leave by themselves the circle they are a child in;
• an invitation or a message from anyone else is blocked before it even reaches them, and the guardian sees those attempts;
• in each circle, a guardian chooses which position sharing modes the child can use;
• the child keeps the SOS button, which alerts their guardians.

Child mode does not lock sharing. The child can always stop sharing their position, their guardians can choose to be told when that happens, and nothing a guardian does turns a child’s sharing on remotely: a guardian can only ask them to resume. Three questions cover this in detail: What can a guardian decide about a child’s position sharing?, Can a child stop sharing their position? and My child stopped sharing their position: how am I told, and what can I do?.

Designating a child requires parental consent: a code sent by SMS to the guardian’s verified number. Fenzly keeps only a receipt of that consent (identifiers, method, date) so it can be demonstrated, never the names or the composition of the family. The child’s positions stay end-to-end encrypted like everyone else’s.

Fenzly does not know the members’ ages: child mode ends when a guardian removes the designation, and not before. The guide Turning on child mode details the steps.

In a family circle, a guardian chooses, for each child, which sharing modes the child can use with that circle. The setting is in the circle, on the child’s card: Manage child, card “What Leo can share with this circle” (Leo standing here for the child’s first name).

The card lists the four sharing choices every member has, one checkbox each:

• Everything: their full timeline, trips and stays;
• Circle places: their presence at the circle’s shared places only;
• Latest position: only their latest known position, with no history;
• Off: they do not share their position with this circle.

The checked boxes are the choices the child can make. At least one stays checked, and by default all four are: the child then sets their sharing like an adult.

• One sharing mode checked: when the child shares with this circle, it is in that mode, and the app shows “Imposed mode”.
• The “Off” box decides whether you are told about a stop. Checked: “Leo can stop sharing without you being told”. Unchecked: “You are told if Leo stops sharing”. Either way the child keeps the ability to stop, see Can a child stop sharing their position?.
• “Off” alone checked: the child does not share their position with this circle.

If the child was using a mode you remove, their sharing moves to the nearest allowed mode. The app tells you before saving (“Leo currently shares Everything. Their sharing will move to Circle places and Leo will be told.”) and the child gets a notification that names you: no mode changes silently. On their phone, the choices that are not allowed stay visible, greyed out, with a note saying who chose.

Three limits, by design:

• The setting applies to one circle. A child who is a member of two family circles has one setting per circle, decided by the guardians of each.
• No setting turns sharing on remotely. A child who stopped sharing stays stopped, even if you uncheck “Off” afterwards: the checked boxes are the modes they will find when they resume. You can ask them to resume, see My child stopped sharing their position: how am I told, and what can I do?.
• It stays between the child and their guardians. The circle’s other guardians see the same setting, with the name of whoever changed it; the other adults are not told that a mode is imposed.

These settings travel end-to-end encrypted between your phones: the server does not even know they exist. The guide Turning on child mode walks through the screens.

Yes, always. Fenzly does not lock a child’s sharing: a guardian chooses which sharing modes are offered, the child decides whether sharing is on. What child mode adds is that the guardians can be told about the stop.

How a child stops

• By choosing “Off” in the circle’s Sharing tab, when a guardian left that choice checked. Nobody is alerted; the members simply see that the child no longer shares their position, as for any member.
• From the Settings, in every case: by turning off “Position sharing” or “Geolocation”, or by turning on “Offline mode”. Logging out of the app stops the sharing too. These stops apply to all their circles.

When a guardian unchecked “Off” for a circle, the “Off” card is greyed out there on the child’s phone, and a note under the choices says where to stop: turn off “Position sharing” in the settings, with an “Open the settings” button.

What the child sees before stopping

If a guardian is to be told, the app first asks for a confirmation: “Stop sharing?”, followed by the names of those who will be told, for example “Sophie and Marc will be told.” The child can cancel. If they confirm, the guardians are told, then the sharing stops. A line stays in their conversation with each guardian: “You stopped sharing your position. Sophie was notified”.

Resuming

The child resumes by turning back on what they turned off, or by choosing an allowed mode in the circle’s Sharing tab. The guardians who were told about the stop are told about the resume as well. A guardian can ask them to resume: the child then gets “Sophie is asking you to share your position again”, with a button that lifts whatever stops the sharing. The guardian cannot do it for them.

What does not change

• The SOS button works even when sharing is stopped: during an alert, their position reaches the alerted members whatever their settings. See How does the SOS button work?.
• A child cannot leave, by themselves, the circle they are a child in.

The stop notice, the resume notice and a guardian’s request are end-to-end encrypted: the server does not know that a child stopped or resumed sharing. For the guardian’s side, see My child stopped sharing their position: how am I told, and what can I do?.

When you are told

You are told if you are a guardian of the circle and the “Off” box is unchecked for that child in that circle (Manage child, card “What Leo can share with this circle”, Leo standing here for the child’s first name). The app says so under the box: “You are told if Leo stops sharing”. As long as “Off” is checked, which is the default, the child can stop without you being told.

The child knows you will be: before stopping, the app asks them for a confirmation that names you. See Can a child stop sharing their position?.

What you see

• An announcement or a notification: “Leo stopped sharing their position”. With the app open, it is an announcement at the top of the screen; otherwise, a notification with a sound (on Android, category “Sharing alerts”). Both open your conversation with the child. At the resume, you likewise get “Leo is sharing their position again”.
• In your conversation with the child: their latest stop appears as a card, with the button “Ask Leo to resume”. Older stops, resumes and your own requests stay as dated lines: the trace does not vanish with the notification.
• In Manage child: “Sharing stopped since 14:02”, with the same button.
• On the map: the child is flagged like any member who no longer shares their position.

What you can do

Ask, never force. “Ask Leo to resume” sends the child “Sophie is asking you to share your position again”, with a button that fits whatever stops the sharing: “Resume”, “Go back online” or “Choose a mode”. On your side, the card shows “Request sent · 14:25” then “You can ask again at 14:30.”: one request every 5 minutes at most. When the child resumes, it shows “Sharing resumed · 14:35”.

Nothing a guardian does turns sharing on remotely, neither checking or unchecking a box, nor the request. The conversation with the child is also the place to talk about it.

What Fenzly cannot see

The notice covers the stops made in the app. A phone that is switched off or in airplane mode, or an uninstalled app, tells nobody; the location permission removed in the phone’s settings is only announced the next time the app opens. In those cases, the map shows “Last contact”, followed by the time, once the phone has not connected for 3 hours. A stop made without network is announced to you when the connection returns.

The stop notice, the resume notice and your request travel end-to-end encrypted: the server does not know that a child stopped or resumed sharing. To choose the modes offered to the child, see What can a guardian decide about a child’s position sharing?.

It is Fenzly’s “on my way”: your real-time position, sent to a person or a circle, for a duration you choose. It stops by itself: when the chosen time is up, at the end of the day, or when you arrive if you set a destination.

It starts in one gesture, with no invitation to accept on the other side. The person sees a card in the conversation, “sharing their position live, 42 min left”, and your marker moves on their map. You can stop it at any time, from the map or the banner at the top of the screen.

How it differs from sharing in a circle: the circle is permanent and quiet, arrivals and departures at shared places and last known position; live sharing is temporary and continuous. It works even if your circle sharing is set to “Off”, and it uses almost nothing while you are not moving.

The position leaves end-to-end encrypted, for each recipient. If someone you do not know sends you a share, it lands in “Requests” and nothing shows on your map until you accept. The guide Sharing my position live details the steps.

The Places tab sorts your places into two lists, and a third notion comes from the circles:

• Favorite places (★): the spots that matter to you, home, school, the office. They are watched at all times: Fenzly detects your arrivals and departures, even in the Simple recording mode. They are the only places you can share with a circle.
• Visited places: everything else your history knows, the stops you named along your trips and the addresses saved without pinning them. Each keeps its visit count and the date of the last one. They are not watched, trigger no alert and cannot be shared. A visited place becomes a favorite in one gesture, and the other way round.
• Shared places: a favorite you add to a circle becomes a place of the circle. Its definition, name, position, radius, photo, is sent to every member, who each detect their own passages there without creating anything. Only the circle’s guardians or admins can edit it; the star and the category stay personal.

A circle place shows in your favorites with the circle’s chip. If you leave the circle, the places you had starred stay with you as personal places, the others are removed. Notifications about members’ arrivals are set in the circle, not on the place. The guide Organising my places walks through each gesture.

There is only one kind of circle, and it serves every purpose: a family, a couple, a flat share, a group of friends. Create one per group that matters, each with its name, colour, shared places and conversation. The same person can be a member of several circles, and what they share is set circle by circle.

What makes the difference between a “family” circle and a “friends” circle is what you do with it:

• Sharing is always an individual choice. Each member picks their own mode: everything, the circle’s places, the latest position, or nothing. A friends’ circle set to “Circle places” or “Off” reveals only what each person decided.
• Roles. Whoever creates the circle is its guardian: they manage members and shared places, and can appoint other guardians. The others are adults, or children if a guardian designates them so, with parental consent. For a child, a guardian chooses which sharing modes are offered, and the child can always stop sharing (see What is child mode?). Child mode only makes sense in a family circle.
• SOS. An SOS alert goes to all your circles by default. For a friends’ circle, you can exclude it from your alerts in its settings.

A couple is simply a circle with two members. The server, for its part, knows neither the circle’s name nor who is in it: that composition lives only on the members’ phones. The guide Creating a circle and inviting members details the steps.

Yes, by default. A new account starts in Detailed mode: Fenzly detects that you start moving and records the trip without intervention, which is what lets your timeline build itself. The Recording mode can be changed at any time in Settings:

• Detailed: your movements are recorded automatically, on foot, running, by bike or by car, and the transport mode is recognised from the trip. You can also start a trip by hand from the map with “Start trip”.
• Simple: Fenzly only notes your arrivals and departures at your favorite places. No trip, very little battery.

A recorded trip keeps its route, duration, distance, speeds and elevation. You find it in your timeline and in the History tab, Trips view. It lives only on your phone, and you can correct it, for instance to say it was a bus or a train, or delete it.

Your people only see a trip if you share “Everything” with their circle. They then see a line in their feed, “Trip 22 min · 9.4 km”, with no detail. If you turn on Detailed trips for that circle, they can also open the trip: route, speeds, elevation. Everything leaves end-to-end encrypted; the server knows nothing of it. The guide Recording and sharing my trips details the settings.

Yes. The trip screen is a full GPS activity recorder, with no smartwatch and no third-party account: tap Start trip on the map, pick the mode, running, on foot, by bike, or leave Auto to let Fenzly detect it, and go. During the session the screen shows live speed, average speed, distance covered, elapsed time and your track on the map, with a Direction up view if you prefer.

When you stop, the session’s page opens with its route, duration, distance, average and maximum speed and its elevation profile. You can file it under a trip category, Leisure, Sport, Work, Travel or one of your own, and export it as GPX to open it in any other app.

The History tab then gathers all your outings by week, month or year: number of sessions, kilometres added up, filters by category and by transport mode. A group outing has one more asset: the members of your circles show on the trip map, with their distance from you, end-to-end encrypted like everything else. Your sessions never leave your phone, other than towards the circles you choose. The guide Recording a walk, a run or a bike ride walks through the screen step by step.

For keeping an unlimited history without your phone or your backups growing without end. A trip recorded in Detailed mode is several hundred GPS points. After a few months of automatic recording, those points make up most of the space Fenzly uses and of the size of every backup, while most of them no longer serve any purpose: a track draws just as well with ten times fewer points.

The option, on by default in Settings right under History retention, therefore does this:

• It only touches trips older than 30 days. A recent outing keeps every point, leaving time to review it, correct it or export it as GPX at full resolution.
• It freezes the figures first. Distance, duration, average and maximum speed, elevation are computed and stored on the trip before any simplification: what you then read on the card or in the history does not change.
• It then simplifies the track, keeping only the points that matter for the shape of the route, to within 5 metres, plus the start, the finish and the top-speed point. On screen, the track looks the same.

The result is storage five to ten times lighter for old trips, faster backups, and a history that stays complete as far back as you go. Turn the option off if you want to keep every point of every trip, for instance to re-export old outings as GPX in full detail; the price is heavier storage and backups. The depth of the history is set separately, with the retention duration (guide Reading my history).

Your life on the move, seen from three angles, over the period of your choice, this week, this month or this year:

• Places: where you spent your time. Each place with its number of visits and the time added up, ranked by frequency or by duration. A place opens on its detail: time spent per day, per week or per month, entries and exits.
• Categories: the same reading by theme, home, work, sport, shops, restaurants, or the categories you created. How long at the office this month, how many visits to the club this year.
• Trips: your trips, grouped by day, with the number of trips and the total distance over the period, filterable by trip category, Leisure, Sport, Work, Travel or your own, and by transport mode.

This is what sets Fenzly apart from apps that only show the last thirty days: the history goes back as far as you decide, a setting letting you keep everything or limit it to 24, 12 or 6 months. It holds only your own data, computed on your phone from what you recorded: none of this history exists on the server side. The guide Reading my history details each view.

Because Fenzly knows where you stopped, not what the place is. Your timeline builds itself, stops and trips, but a stop at a place you have never named shows there with its coordinates: the app does not guess that it was a restaurant.

Naming the place once is enough:

1. In the timeline, tap the pencil on the stop to open “Name this place”.
2. Check the pin on the map, then pick a name. Fenzly suggests your nearby places first, then the establishments around.
3. Save it in your visited places, or in your favorites if you also want your arrivals and departures there to be detected.

From then on, your visits to that place are recognised, in the timeline and in the History tab, where only named places are ranked.

Two special cases:

• Several places at the same address, a shopping centre for instance: GPS cannot tell them apart. “Correct place” reassigns one specific visit, and “Use this place by default here” picks the one retained by default.
• A short move was not detected: the “Check in” button on the map adds your current position to the timeline and offers to name it.

The establishment suggestions are looked up when you name the place, through the Fenzly server, so that the map provider does not see your IP address. The name you give stays on your phone; it is only sent, encrypted, to the circles you share that place or your whole timeline with. The guide Naming the places in my timeline walks through each step.

Not in normal use. Fenzly does not track your route continuously: it reacts to events, an arrival at or a departure from a place, a trip that starts or ends. When you sit at home, the app uses almost nothing.

Check, in order:

1. The place is shared in the circle by the person concerned, and you turned notifications on for that place (the option “Be notified when a circle member arrives at … or leaves”).
2. Location is set to “Always”, not “While using the app”. On iOS that choice is offered a second time a few days after install: refuse the downgrade.
3. On Android, battery optimisation is off for Fenzly. Some manufacturers (Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Oppo) kill background apps regardless: add Fenzly to the protected apps in the manufacturer’s settings.
4. The other person’s phone has network. A member with no connection for several hours is flagged on the map.

All four points must hold on both phones: the one detecting the arrival and the one receiving the notification.

Fenzly only tells you what you asked for, except for an SOS:

• Arrivals and departures: “Emma arrived at School”. Nothing by default. In each circle you choose, place by place and member by member, whether you want to be told about entering, leaving, or both.
• Messages: each conversation is muted separately, from its menu.
• Invitations and requests: someone invites you into a circle, or asks to join yours with your code.
• Live sharing: someone close starts sharing their position with you.
• SOS: the alert of a member of your circles. It rings loudly and repeats until an adult takes charge; it cannot be muted.
• Child mode: if you are a guardian and chose to be told, a child stopping and resuming their sharing, “Leo stopped sharing their position”. A child, for their part, is told about every change a guardian makes to their sharing choices, and about a request to resume. See My child stopped sharing their position: how am I told, and what can I do?.
• Your account: a new device signs into your account, or your new phone asks for a backup.

The text of the notifications is composed on your phone, from the encrypted data: the server only sends a wake-up signal, with no name and no place. On Android, a discreet “Fenzly active” notification stays on permanently: it is what lets the app watch your places while closed; it can be minimised but not removed. The guide Setting my notifications goes through every setting.

The round red button on the map sends an alert, with your position, to the members of all your circles, except the circles you excluded from your SOS alerts in their settings. After a ten-second countdown, which you can cancel with a swipe, the alert goes out and their phones ring, loudly and repeatedly, until an adult of the circle takes charge.

What happens next, in order:

1. Your people are alerted and follow your position live on the map, even if your sharing was off.
2. A guardian or an adult taps “I’m on it”: the ringing stops for everyone and you see who is looking after you.
3. If nobody has seen the alert after two minutes, Fenzly sends an SMS to every member with a verified number. The SMS says your position is in the app; it never contains the position itself. Your screen then offers to call someone close or the emergency services.

Your position during the alert. It keeps reaching the alerted members as you move, and they see “Live position” on the alert. It works in the background, even with the app closed, and it goes through everything that would otherwise hide you: Position sharing switched off, a circle set to “Off”, Geolocation switched off. It stops by itself when you cancel the alert, 30 minutes after someone takes charge, or 4 hours after the alert if nobody ever does. Apart from cancelling the alert, nobody can stop it sooner, a child no more than an adult.

A false alarm is cancelled from the alert screen: members are told. With no network, the app says so plainly, puts calling first, and keeps the alert queued to send it as soon as the connection is back. If Offline mode was on, sending the alert turns it off, and it stays off afterwards: switch it back on by hand if you want.

Your position stays end-to-end encrypted, live sharing included: the server knows an alert happened, when, who was alerted and who took charge, never where you are. The SOS button does not replace the emergency services: in immediate danger, call first. The guide Using the SOS button covers the setup and the receiving side.

Because your data exists only on your phone. The Fenzly server knows neither your places, nor your circles, nor your messages: it cannot give anything back if the phone is lost, broken or replaced.

The backup is encrypted before it leaves the device. Two modes exist: the automatic backup, whose key is split into two halves that neither Fenzly nor your cloud space can read alone, and the Fenzly-hosted backup, protected by a recovery code only you hold.

Turn it on from day one in Settings → Backup, then check the date of the last backup from time to time.

Not to be confused with “Download my data”: that export is a readable copy, for you, and it cannot restore an account. Only the backup can.

Sign in on the new phone with the same number or email. Fenzly recognises your account and opens “Restore your data”, with two ways back.

• From another phone, when you still have the old one: open Fenzly on it. It detects the migration and asks whether to back up and transfer your data. Confirm: a fresh backup goes out, the new phone receives it and restores your places, circles and conversations, with nothing lost.
• From iCloud or From Google Drive, when you no longer have access to the old phone (lost, broken, wiped): Fenzly restores the latest existing backup and shows its date. Messages received after that backup cannot be recovered, a consequence of end-to-end encryption.

Fenzly is active on one device at a time: once the restore is confirmed, the old phone is signed out and says so. With the backup in your cloud, use the same Google Drive or iCloud account on both phones, that is where the backup lives. The guide Switching phones details the steps.

The backup holds everything that lives only on your phone: your encryption keys first, the vital part, then your places, circles, contacts and conversation history, photos included. It is encrypted on the phone before it leaves, and nobody can read it on the way or where it is kept.

Two possible locations, your choice:

• Your personal cloud, Google Drive on Android or iCloud on iPhone: this is the default. The key protecting the backup is split into two halves, one at Fenzly, the other in your cloud. Neither is any use alone: neither Fenzly nor your cloud can read the backup, and you have nothing to remember.
• Fenzly hosting, in Switzerland: offered at setup, and automatically when your cloud is full. The backup is then protected by a 30-digit recovery code that only you hold; without it, it cannot be recovered on another phone. You can keep a copy of the code in your cloud to find it automatically; it stays unreadable to Fenzly.

In both cases the backup runs by itself when you open the app, and a banner warns you if it fails or is not set up. You can also export an encrypted file to keep wherever you like. The guide Setting up the backup details each setting.

Fenzly is a paid service, with no ads and no data resale: that is what lets us know nothing about you. Every new account starts with a 14-day trial, no card required.

Then one person in the circle takes a subscription, Mono, Duo or Family, in the App Store or Google Play, and assigns a license to each member. Members pay nothing. Prices are shown in your device’s store.

An account whose license expired is not deleted: it keeps seeing what others share, without sharing itself, until a license is assigned to it.

The subscription is managed by the store where you bought it, not by Fenzly. The shortest path: in Fenzly, Settings → License & subscription → Manage opens your subscription directly in the App Store or Google Play. You can also get there yourself:

• iPhone: Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Fenzly → Cancel.
• Android: Google Play → your profile → Payments and subscriptions → Subscriptions → Fenzly → Cancel.

Access stays open until the end of the period already paid, for you and for the members you assigned a license to. Fenzly can neither cancel nor refund on your behalf: refunds are requested from Apple or Google.

A subscription is a set of identical licenses, paid by one person: Mono holds one, Duo two, Family eight. The payer assigns a license to each member of their circles; each license covers one person, whatever their circles and role.

An assigned license arrives directly, with no invitation to accept, and the person is told. The payer can also turn on automatic assignment for a circle: each member they accept into it then gets a free license, in order of arrival. The person keeps the last word and can give their license back; the payer can take one back at any time. Either way, the person keeps sharing for three days, time enough to sort things out.

Every account starts with a 14-day trial, with no card and no automatic billing. Without a license at the end of the trial, or after a subscription ends, the account goes into spectator mode: it still sees what its people share and keeps its conversations, but no longer shares its position or records its trips, until a license is assigned to it again.

The license is tied to your Fenzly account, not to your phone: a subscription taken on Google Play keeps covering your account on an iPhone, and the other way round. The subscription itself is still managed in the store where it was taken. Two active subscriptions for the same payer do not add up; the most generous one is used and the other expires by itself. The guide Assigning licenses to my circle details the steps.

With automatic assignment, each member you accept into a circle gets a free license from your subscription. If that did not happen, one of these reasons applies:

• The circle is not in automatic mode. It only is if you turned it on, through the question asked after the purchase or the box ticked when creating your first circle. Check in the circle, Sharing tab, Licenses section.
• No license is free. Uncovered members are served in their order of arrival as soon as a license is freed or you move to a bigger plan. A member who arrived earlier in another of your circles in automatic mode comes first.
• The person is already covered by someone else’s subscription: a person holds only one license at a time.
• The person gave the license back. Automatic assignment does not give it to them again by itself.
• Your app has not taken over yet. Your phone hands out the licenses, not the server, which knows nothing of your circles. If another guardian accepted the member, open Fenzly with a connection and the assignment happens.

You can always assign a license by hand from Settings → License & subscription → Distributed licenses (guide Assigning licenses to my circle).

From the app: Settings → Personal data → Delete my account and my data. A confirmation code is sent to you, then the deletion is immediate and permanent. Without access to the app, use the site’s Delete my account page.

What happens: your account and keys are erased from the server, your devices wipe their local data at their next launch, and you disappear from your circles. Your backups are erased too, the Fenzly-hosted ones as well as the key share that made the automatic backup readable: nothing can be restored afterwards, there is no way back. Export your data first if you want to keep a copy — but know that this copy is a document to read, not a backup: it will not recreate the account. Coming back to Fenzly afterwards means starting with a brand-new account, with no history, that your relatives will have to re-invite into their circles.

A running subscription is not refunded by this action, cancel it first in the store. If you are the only guardian of a child in a circle, appoint another guardian first: deletion is blocked while a child depends on you alone.

Yes, at two levels, both from Settings → Personal data → Download my data:

• Phone data: a readable file (compressed JSON) with your places, your trips, your timeline and your settings, positions included if you enable them, created on the phone. It holds your own data only: your circle members’ positions and the chat threads are other people’s data and are not part of it.
• Server data: a nearly empty document, on purpose. It lists your account, your devices and your subscription receipts, and that is everything the server holds.

Both exports are immediate and involve no human operator.

These exports are copies to read or archive, not backups: they cannot be imported back into Fenzly, and they cannot recreate an account. To be able to restore your account one day, turn on the backup.

From the app: Settings → Account & app → Report a problem. Before you sign in, the “Having trouble?” link under the sign-in screen and on the restore screen opens the same form.

The form asks for your email, where support replies (prefilled when your account has one), and a description of what happened. A few technical details the app knows about itself travel with your message: its version and build, the platform and system version, the language, whether it can reach the server, the state of its permissions, the battery setting, the background-location state and your role in your circle (guardian, adult or child). Never a position, a place name, a member name or a circle: the report is about the app, not about where you are.

What you can add, each time you choose to:

• Technical logs. The “Attach technical logs” switch is on by default and adds the last 24 hours of the app’s technical log, with emails, phone numbers, identifiers and positions masked. “See what will be sent” shows the exact text that will leave; turn the switch off to send the report without it.
• Screenshots. “Add a screenshot” picks up to three images from your gallery. A screenshot of the map can show positions and the names of your circle members, so check what you pick.
• Detailed logs. If support asks for more detail, turn on “Detailed logs for 24 hours”, reproduce the problem, then send a new report. It switches itself off after 24 hours.

Nothing is stored on Fenzly’s servers: the report is relayed as one email to the support team, with the context and the attachments, and the server keeps no copy. The reply comes to the address you typed. If the app cannot reach Fenzly, it offers to send the same report through your mail app instead.